Farallon Islands Fishing: 27 Miles Out, and the Four Closures That Decide Where You Drop

Four closures ring the islands, and only one of them lets you fish

Start here, because it changes what you should ask the skipper. The Farallones are surrounded by three state marine protected areas and one special closure, written into Title 14 of the California Code of Regulations at section 632. Two of them are full reserves where the regulation is as blunt as regulations get: "It is unlawful to injure, damage, take, or possess any living, geological, or cultural marine resource." That is everything — fish, invertebrates, kelp, rocks.

The third, the Southeast Farallon Island State Marine Conservation Area, carries exactly one exception: "Recreational and commercial take of salmon by trolling is allowed." It is nearly 13 square miles of water in which a trolled salmon is legal and a rockfish is not. The fourth is a special closure you may not even enter — 0.18 square miles around Southeast Farallon Island, closed to entry year-round except for named agency staff on official duty or by permission from the Department.

The practical upshot is simple. A rockfish or lingcod drop at "the Farallones" has to happen outside those boxes, on the surrounding structure rather than up against the islands themselves. Any reputable Bay Area skipper knows exactly where the lines are and runs the trip accordingly — but it is a fair question to ask when you book, and it explains why the boat may steam past perfectly fishy-looking rock without slowing down.

• The Southeast Farallon reserve is a box: 37° 42.600' N to 37° 40.500' N, and 122° 59.500' W to 123° 02.000' W
• The North Farallon reserve is the larger of the two at more than 18 square miles
• Ask your skipper where the trip plans to fish — it is a normal question, not a rude one
• Sanctuary status is separate: being inside the Greater Farallones sanctuary does not by itself close water to fishing

Salmon by trolling: the one thing the conservation area allows

That single exception matters more in 2026 than it has in years, because salmon came back. Fish Emeryville's own annual totals show 5,061 Chinook for the 2026 season to date against 1,545 for all of 2025 — better than triple. On the landing's October 2026 board, salmon trolling trips were the hard ticket while the rockfish boats still had room.

The season you are fishing under: the recreational ocean salmon fishery from 38° 02' N latitude, near Point Reyes, south to Pigeon Point opened September 1, 2026 and runs through October 31, 2026, or until a 20,000-fish harvest guideline is reached, whichever comes first. The daily bag is two salmon of any species except coho, with a 20-inch minimum total length. Salmon may not be filleted aboard the boat, and you may have only one daily bag limit with you on a vessel in ocean waters, two once you are on land.

Because that guideline can close the fishery early, a salmon trip booked for late October is a trip booked against a clock. Check the status before you drive to the dock, and read our guide to the 2026 reopening for how the season was built.

Which Bay Area trips actually go there

Fish Emeryville at 3310 Powell Street, (510) 652-3403, runs a twelve-boat fleet and is the most practical departure for the islands. Parking is free, check-in is 30 minutes before the trip departs, rod rentals are $10, tackle kits run $12 to $22 depending on what you are after, and a 2026 one-day California fishing license is $21.09 at the counter. The no-glass policy is strict on every boat, coolers up to 45 quarts are allowed, and dockside fish processing is available when you get back.

Sea Wolf Sportfishing, one of the boats in that fleet, says plainly that it specializes in "finding quality Rockfish and Lingcod at the Farallon Islands and along the California Coast," and adds rockfish and Dungeness crab combination trips in November and December. A full day is 5:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. — ten and a half hours, most of which is not fishing, because 27 miles out and 27 miles back takes what it takes.

One detail on the whole-boat rate card is worth reading even if you are buying a single seat, because it tells you these are not all the same trip: the landing prices coastal and deepwater rockfish charters differently. On the Lady K a coastal rockfish and lingcod charter is $2,400 and the deepwater version is $2,700; on the six-passenger Play'n Hooky it is $1,650 against $1,800. The island run is the expensive end of that spread.

What actually comes over the rail

October 11, 2026 was an ordinary Sunday at Fish Emeryville: four boats, 66 anglers, 430 rockfish, 27 king salmon and 22 lingcod. The New Huck Finn took 21 anglers on a full day and counted 210 rockfish and 16 lingcod. The Sea Wolf took 22 and counted 220 rockfish and 6 lingcod. The Oakland Anglers II brought in 15 king salmon for 17 anglers, and the six-passenger Scallywag brought 12 for 6.

Look at the rockfish arithmetic on those first two boats. Ten fish per angler is the bag limit for the rockfish, cabezon and greenling complex. Two boats, 43 anglers, 430 rockfish — straight limits, with nothing left on the table. That is the thing the Farallones are famous for, and the spring counts say it was not a fluke: across seven Sea Wolf island trips between April 24 and May 5, 2026 the boat reported exactly ten rockfish per angler every single time, and full two-fish lingcod limits on five of the seven.

The year-over-year table below needs one honest caveat before you read it. The collapse in the Dungeness crab column is not a crab shortage — it is the 2025-26 season being delayed into January by whale entanglement risk and domoic acid, which wiped out most of the crab trips a Bay Area fleet would normally run. Rockfish is down against a very big 2025. Salmon is the one that genuinely turned around.

Why October is still a Farallon month

The islands sit inside CDFW's San Francisco Management Area, which runs from 38° 57.5' N latitude at Point Arena south to 37° 11' N at Pigeon Point. For 2026 that area has the simplest groundfish calendar on the coast: closed in all waters from January 1 to March 31, then open at all depths from April 1 right through December 31, for the rockfish complex and for lingcod alike.

That is worth contrasting with the other end of the state, because it is the single biggest reason a Northern California October looks nothing like a Southern California one. Down in the Southern Management Area, October 1 closes nearshore rockfish outright and pushes shelf and slope rockfish and lingcod seaward of the 50-fathom line, which is why a Marina del Rey or Redondo Beach half day in the fall is a sculpin-and-whitefish trip. Up here there is no October wall. The boats are still running straight rockfish limits at the islands in the second week of October.

The limits themselves: ten fish in combination per person across the rockfish, cabezon and greenling complex, with copper rockfish capped at one, vermilion and sunset at two combined, and canary at two. Lingcod are two per person at a 22-inch minimum. Our bag and size limits guide carries the full species list, including the rockfish you must release regardless of season.

You cannot set foot on them

The islands themselves are the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, and public access is prohibited. Southeast Farallon, the big one, is roughly 65 acres — a stretch of rock about the size of a few city blocks. Together the islands hold the largest nesting seabird colony in the contiguous United States, with around 350,000 breeding birds of 13 species.

That is what the special closure at section 632(b)(55) is protecting, and it is why the state wrote an entry prohibition rather than just a take prohibition. Biologists from Point Blue Conservation Science first landed in 1967 and have kept a permanent presence on the island since 1968, working jointly with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under a cooperative agreement from 1971. Somebody is living out there, year-round, counting birds.

Wildlife tours do run to the islands and they are worth the trip if birds and marine mammals are what you are after — but they circle and they do not land. If your mental picture of a Farallon day involves stepping ashore, adjust it now: you will see the islands from the rail of a boat, and that is the whole of it.

White sharks, and what the sanctuary forbids

The Farallones are the most famous white shark aggregation site on the planet, and the surrounding water is the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. Since March 2009 the sanctuary has prohibited attracting a white shark anywhere within it, and approaching within 50 meters of any white shark inside Special Wildlife Protection Zones 6 and 7, or within one nautical mile of those zones. The rules were published in the Federal Register in November 2008 and sit in Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations, part 922.

NOAA describes those special zones as the areas around high concentrations of white sharks, breeding seals and sea lions, or breeding birds vulnerable to human disturbance — which is to say, exactly the water a boat would be tempted to linger in. The sanctuary can issue permits for otherwise prohibited activity, mainly research, under 15 C.F.R. section 922.83.

For a paying angler this is mostly a thing to know rather than a thing to do. You may well see a white shark on a fall trip; it happens. What cannot happen is chumming to bring one up, or the boat running over to sit on top of one. A skipper who declines to do either is following federal law, not being unhelpful.

The barrels on the bottom, and whether the fish are safe

This is the other question people ask about the Farallones, and it deserves a straight answer rather than either a shrug or a scare. Between 1946 and 1970 roughly 47,800 containers of low-level radioactive waste were dumped into the gulf south and west of the islands. The records put about 150 drums at a depth near 90 meters, about 3,600 near 900 meters and around 44,000 at a nominal 1,800 meters, totaling an estimated 540 terabecquerels, or about 14,500 curies. Other industrial waste went over the side in the same area.

The barrels are real and they have been looked at. A 1998 interagency survey involving the U.S. Geological Survey, the EPA, NOAA, the British Geological Survey and the sanctuary itself mapped barrels across 125 square kilometers and confirmed them with underwater cameras and Navy submersibles, finding them in every state from fully intact to completely disintegrated.

On eating the fish, here is what the public health guidance actually says: there is no Farallon-specific consumption advisory. This stretch of coast falls under California's statewide advisory for coastal locations without site-specific advice, which exists because of mercury and PCBs found in ocean fish generally — not because of the waste site. For the per-species serving counts, go to the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment rather than to a fishing forum. It is also worth noting the depths: the overwhelming majority of those barrels lie at 900 and 1,800 meters, thousands of feet below any bottom these boats fish.

The crossing, the cancellations, and a Farallon seat at a last-minute price

Twenty-seven miles each way in open ocean is the part of this trip people underestimate. A full day is 5:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., you cross the San Francisco bar on the way out and again on the way home, and there is no turning back at ten o'clock because somebody feels rough. If you are unsure how you travel, take something the night before and again in the morning — our seasickness guide covers what actually works and when to take it.

Weather cancels these trips, and that is not a hypothetical: on the schedule we read on October 12, 2026, the Sea Wolf's rockfish and lingcod trip for the following day was already canceled. A canceled island trip is also one of the ways seats appear somewhere else at short notice, when a crew reshuffles a boat onto a date that was only half sold.

The open seats are where the pattern gets interesting, because it runs opposite to what most people assume. On that same October board, nearly every salmon trolling trip was full — KingFish, C Gull II, Diamond, Here We Go, the Pacific Pearl — while the rockfish boats had room: 6 of 20 open on the Sea Wolf that morning, 3 of 20 on the Friday, 6 of 25 on the TigerFish, and 7 of 16 on the C Gull II for the Saturday. The cheaper trip to the better-known destination was the one with seats.

That is exactly the gap a last-minute deal fills. When a captain would rather sell a seat at a discount than steam 27 miles with an empty rail, the seat shows up here. You book directly with the operator through an affiliate link or coupon code, you pay the boat, and nothing is added to your price.

• Full day to the islands: about ten and a half hours, most of it steaming
• Rockfish and lingcod seats were the ones going spare in October 2026; salmon trips were selling out
• Weather cancellations are normal — build a spare day into a fishing trip built around the Farallones
• Check in 30 minutes before departure at Emeryville; parking is free